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How Not to Write FORTRAN in Any Language
gManZboy writes "In an article that's sure to p/o Fortran programmers, Donn Seeley has assembled a rant that posits there are characteristics of good coding that transcend all programming languages, except Fortran. Seriously though, his point is that early FORTRAN made coding ugly. Thus the joke 'Don't write FORTRAN' was applied to anyone with ugly code. Though Fortran has in recent years overcome its early challenges, the point -- 'Don't write FORTRAN' (i.e. ugly stuff) -- still applies."
When I took computer programming in high school, it was all FORTRAN. We used a wonderfully dry textL FORTRAN IV with WATFOR and WATFIV. We didn't have any sort of microcomputer (this was 1980, and we were behind the times even then), but we had a keypunch, so we'd write code on a form, punch cards, rubber band 'em together, and send them off to be run on the district's big iron. Then you'd wait a week and get back a few sheet of green and white striped paper with ***SYNTAX ERROR*** all over it. And we liked it that way!
Although that was a toothache of a programming experience, I have never lost this bizarre fondness I have for that ugly, unwieldy, but somehow cool FORTRAN. Writing that stuff makes you feel like you're talking the language of a retro-scifi computer, like the ones in the original Star Trek that spoke in that odd mechanical monotone. Robby the Robot had to
have been programmed in FORTRAN (and NO he was NOT a guy in a suit! I'm not listening! La la la!).
At any rate, old-fashioned FORTRAN may deserve to be bashed, but I can't help shedding a tear.
Thus the joke 'Don't write FORTRAN' was applied to anyone with ugly code.
I mostly program in C, Java,php and C++(and several other languages that I dont use as much), and am always interested in picking up new languages to play around with. Is Fortran worth learning? And are there any things that it does a lot better than other languages?
Boxing Equipment Reviews
I'm more of a western coder ... lots of wide open spaces in between clauses for readability. Documentation in bits rather than 100 lines of code then a paragraph about what happened in there.
I'm sure someone somewhere would gripe about my style too.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Isn't FORTRAN used these days primarily to figure out mathematical and engineering calculations? I am sure most of these programs are small and maintained by a few people. So does it matter if it is ugly? I am sure there are FORTRAN libraries to access databases but how many are really large programs??
I have had to make changes to UNIX shell scripts and PERL code before. Most of the undocumented cryptic scripts were small enough to figure out what I needed to change.
I prided myself in college that I could write FORTRAN in any language. I had a prof that couldn't figure out why I was doing bit manipulation in COBOL. (Yes, this can be done in COBOL through multiplication and division, but it's really ugly.)
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
I think people like perl because you can do cool things in a short program with it, not because it's beautiful.
I am trolling
So what if Fortran is ugly--all languages get uglier the less they are used and the more high-level languages are developed. I'm sure lots of people would look at assembly code and say it's ugly too. It's only a matter of time before our kids look at C++ code and say, "Boy, am I glad I didn't have to program like that!".
Kinda reminds me of "Back to the Future III" where Marty plays that shoot-em-up arcade game in front of kids, and all they can do is complain "You mean you have to use your hands. That's like a baby's toy."
I, for one, look forward to the day when I can think code and have it be done instead of writing it line-by-line.
... people would have got the point. Christ even John Backus (FORTRAN's creator) said that FORTRAN and even all imperative languages were horrible ugly hack, and that we should all go away and use "[the] functional style, and it's algebra of programs".(warning: pdf link).
[A two page ad. A middle-age man with a youthful, shy grin, dark horn-rimmed glasses, slicked, short hair, and the premonition of a hairy chest emerging from a blue denim(?) shirt, fills the left page; the vista of urban sprawl outside a window behind him; painted scrawls of mathematical formulas superimposed. On the right hand page is a block of sans-serif text]
Meet an elder statesman in the computer business.
IBM's Jon Backus is 43, pretty young for an elder statesman in most industries. But then, the computer business is less than 20 years old and a mathematician Bakcus has been in it since the beginning. He started workig with computers in the early 1950's. It was about the time a leading business magazine estimated that no more than 50 companies would ever have use for a comptuer. Today, it is estimated that there are well over 50,000 comptuer installations in the United States alone. Part of the reason for this astonishing growth: the progress made in programming. In this field, John Backus was a pioneer. "It bothered us, in the early days of computers, that so few people coluld use them" he says. "One reason was, programming cost as much as the machine. A small compnay just couldn't afford data processing." With a small group of associates, John Backus tackled the problem and stayed with it for three years. The result was the simplified programming system called FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) which made programming considerably less expensive than before. Today, FORTRAN is probably the most widely used programming system in the world. Currently, John Backus is working on a new mathematical concept which is still in the realm of pure theory. But his theories, like the work of many IBM scientists, ultimately have a way of making computers more useful.
[A red line runs across the text. A matching red 'IBM' (not the blue, CRT lines version) appears in the margin.]
From a beginning less than two decades ago, computer technology has made remarkable progress. John Backus is one of many outstanding men and women in the industry who have turned a laboratory marvel into tens of thousands of computers helping people around the world.
...but it's still quite possible to write readable and modular code even in Fortran 66.
(I'm saying this as a programmer who spent 12 of the past 15 years doing exactly that -- writing and maintaining Fortran 66 code that was part of a critical production system at a major airline).
As with any language, the onus is on the programmer who is writing the code to organize it and implement it in a way which is easy for subsequent programmers to follow and understand.
We were able to do it even within the limits and conventions present in the environment (external variable/parameter references limited to six (6) characters, internal references limited to either five (5) or one (1) character, subroutine names limited to six characters) by using common sense and trying to use a consistent coding style.
Yes, arithmetic IFs are ugly, computed GOTO statements can be confusing, and strings defined using Hollerith notation are strange to folks who haven't seen it before, and programs are hard to follow when everything is lined up neatly in column 7 without any spacing between code and comments. So don't use that style, avoid confusing notation, and refrain from using confusing syntax or statements which might make the intent of the program unclear.
It's the same advice in any languages -- cute tricks might save a few bytes or clock cycles, but in a production environment it's usually long-term MAINTAINABILITY that counts -- and that's true in *any* language!
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
For certain purposes (including most of what I do), fortran is unmatched.
It is *possible* to write C that runs as fast as Fortran for heavy math. However, it involves hand-optimizing your C until this happens.
Fortran handles calculations quite well, thank you. It take less Fortran code to handle many common operations, and array options are built in and optimized to high heaven.
With Fortran 90 and 95, the grammars that led to the CS horror (e.g., computed gotos) are marked either deleted or obsolescent (meaning expect deletion in another standard or two).
Also, due to the selection of which features are included in Fortran and which are not, Fortran compilers can make much stronger assumptions than, for example, C compilers working with pointers.
There's nothing unfortunate at all about Fortran's (not FORTRAN any more) role in scientific computing. The tragedy is the number of people who bought into those silly C campaigns.
hawk
There is Visual Fortran and Fortran .NET. Visual Fortran I've actually seen and installed on a computer. Watching one of the grad students start to write a Windows program, with GUI, in Fortran was rather scary. I haven't messed with Fortran .NET but apparantly you can really generate .NET code with it. This also mean that one could write stuff in Fortran and call it from C++. To make things even scarier, there's a PERL .NET kit. So one could write a PERL program that calls on Fortran.
:)
These are things man was not meant to do
Certainly, you can write poorly in any language. But you can't necessarily do the opposite.
:P
For example, I initially resisted C++. I viewed it as poorly designed objects on C (after experiencing the beautifully done objects of LPC), and programming examples for it made objects of things that never should have been objects - and as such I wanted nothing to do with it.
However, the other features of C++ ended up proving themselves infinitely useful, and since the value of C++ objects has shot up notably in my mind. Examples:
Templates: I can't even imagine how many pieces of code I wrote before C++ in which I wrote different versions of the same function for different variable types. Talk about a maintainance nightmare
Const correctness: I remember resisting this like crazy, because it makes initial programming harder. But not only does it offer some serious benefits to the compiler at optimization time, but it's saved me many times from errors and really helped with code cleanup and refactoring into functions. My only real problem with it, now, is programmers who don't const their libraries, thus preventing me from consting variables that I need to pass to them at each step of the way.
Destructors: I don't think I need to even get into why having your variables clean up their memory when they go out of scope is probably the best thing that ever happened concerning fighting memory leaks. You can also do garbage collection with smart pointers, but that's a topic for some other time and is less standard.
std::vector: I can't believe that I used to not only have to clean up variable size arrays before, but used to have to have each array contain three variables - the pointer, the count of elements, and the allocated size - all of which would need to be checked and adjusted at each insertion and deletion.
std::string: A lot easier to use than C's unwieldy strings, and easy to convert to and from regular C strings.
I could go on for a long time... a good language can save you many programming headaches if you're willing to learn it.
We also have a halon fire extinguisher. Its always nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people around.
as of this May I will have a B.S. in astronomy, and my Husband will have a B.S. in CS. We spend a lot of time talking about languages, and about the calculations done in astronomy. I think there are two reasons fortran has stayed around for as long as it has. #1. It matches how Physists and Astronomers think. Even though other languages may be prettier or easier to use or whatever, Fortran is still easier for us to pick up than just about anything else. And #2 we like things to be hard and icky. There is only one reason anyone gets any degree in Physics or Astronomy, and that is because they want people to know they are smart. And what do smart people do? Hard things that no one else can run or understand, or enjoy looking at. (Ask any astronomer about IRAF and then you'll know exactly what I mean.) For some reason Fortran makes us feel smart. It's like candy for our egos.